Men With Congential Condition Win Gold Medals For Punching Women In The Face

Disinformation and a developmental distinction without a difference

Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting are men. Both of them were identified as male and excluded from boxing women anymore in 2022 and 2023. Khelif initially appealed this decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which oversees the laboratories that tested both boxers, but withdrew. Lin Yu-ting did not appeal the test at all. The reason why neither man felt likely to win such an appeal is that they are both men.

As Doriane Lambelet Coleman explained in Quillette when the Paris Olympics began, both men were likely born with a disorder of sexual development (DSD) called 5ARD. Males with this condition are often mistaken for female. Rare globally, the condition is common enough in the Dominican Republic that such boys are known as “güevedoces” — roughly, “huevos [‘balls’] at age twelve,” as Arty Morty notes. There is no mystery in what both men are. They are men with a DSD, a distinction without a difference when matching two sparring partners.

When the International Boxing Association (IBA) disqualified both men, they said that testosterone levels were not the subject of their testing. The Algerian Olympic Committee responded with a conspiracy theory about Russian meddling in their bid for Olympic boxing gold. Apologists for Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting are still making this lame excuse today.

The denial stage is over, however. Right after both men were allowed to win gold medals by punching women in the face, Khelif’s coach confirmed his male physiology in an exclusive interview with Le Point magazine.

Female boxers were on the record with their concerns about Khelif before the Olympics. After the games ended, the Technical Commissioner of the Spanish boxing team disclosed that Khelif was “considered too dangerous for women to train against during a boxing retreat in Spain” during 2022.

“Whoever we put [Khelif] with was injured,” Rafa Lozano said.

Lozano says that to avoid further injury to the women, the coaches ended up pairing Khelif up with Jose Quiles, who is one of Spain’s top male boxers, during the retreat. Quiles, 26 and one of Spain’s top boxers, was considered a more equitable match for Khelif to spar against, with Lozano noting that Khelif was only “even” after being matched against the man.

International Olympic Committee (IOC) Chairman Thomas Bach, who never got his story straight about the two men, is leaving the post after 12 years of ignoring women who complain about men in their sports. His historic legacy will be men punching women in the face to win gold medals — and gaslighting the world about it.

Two of the most noxious phrases used in this scandal — “passport sex” and “assigned female at birth” — both originate in intersex advocacy. They were adopted by transgender activism when the so-called ‘Yogyakarta Principles’ were formulated in 2006. Since then, the mere existence of DSDs has become a political tool in the gender wars: they are as common as redheads, supposedly, and somehow destabilize the sex binary in ways that mean we should let men have women’s sports, among other things.

Little wonder that so many members of the public were confused by the news that Caster Semenya was “intersex.” This same confusion reigned when the story broke about men in the women’s Olympic boxing ring. Almost everyone defending this horrific “inclusion,” including Thomas Bach, tripped over the distinction between DSDs and ‘gender identity’ at some point doing so. On the X app, the trending story is still being labeled a “gender controversy.” That’s because gender activists have misrepresented the two groups as a single political project for decades when their needs are in fact entirely different.

Imane Khelif was raised as a girl in a culture that practices routine circumcision of male infants. When his penis masculinized at puberty, it must have been excruciating to come to terms with his new reality. Circumcision was no longer an option, and in fact would probably violate the human rights of an intersex person. We may therefore sympathize with Khelif — right up to the point he uses his masculinized torso to smash women repeatedly in the face. Perhaps Lin Yu-ting has a similar story, and again we would be right to sympathize with him if so, at least until we see this:

In all sports, but especially combat sports, the distinction between men with 5ARD DSD and regular men is not really a difference. They are still men who do not belong in the boxing ring — or the pool, track, etc — with women. Testosterone suppression does not make them into women. They are never, ever women, under any circumstances, because they are male.

Rumblings of regret have begun to reverberate. With Bach leaving the IOC presidency, British Olympian and sports administrator Sebastian Coe says he will run for the job on a platform of protecting women’s sport. “I have a responsibility to preserve the female category, and I will go on doing that until a successor decides otherwise or the science alters.” This is a welcome change from weeks of gaslighting. From the opening ceremony to the closing, the Paris games were defined by debacles and weak attempts to dress them up as success.

Before the games, we were wondering if they would “peak the world” about men in women’s sports. While the games were happening, we experienced moments of despair that women getting punched in the face might not be enough to bring about change. Now that the games are over, it appears that the world may have indeed been peaked — that all the social media bots, smarmy op-eds, and tyrannical language policing may have failed to produce the results that the enemies of women’s sports had desired, indeed they may have achieved the opposite.